


The Thrill of the Fight

by glxybbs



Category: Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter RPF
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, FAHC, Fake AH Crew, Gen, Michael is angry, crew introductions, extremely brief mention of alcohol and underage drinking, like one line of it, underground fighting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-02
Updated: 2020-05-02
Packaged: 2021-03-02 01:55:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,392
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23957263
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glxybbs/pseuds/glxybbs
Summary: Michael hit the floor. Tim stood on the hand without the knuckles and Michael felt something break – he almost screamed, but he’d learned not to show weakness. Weaknesses let people hurt you, and Michael couldn’t afford to be hurt.--Otherwise known as a Tumblr request that got Out Of Hand
Comments: 2
Kudos: 25





	The Thrill of the Fight

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first time I've posted a proper fic in about a year, so I'm a little rusty haha. I hope you like it!! 
> 
> Kudos + comments are appreciated!
> 
> ((1/2/2021 ; edited to correct Rimmy Tim’s pronouns and to remove references to He Who Shall Not Be Named))

Michael knew how to fight. He’d been doing it since he was 7 years old, slapping other kids around for stealing his lunch money, throwing a fist at a teacher for grading his test wrong, slipping into the underground rings with his older brothers to watch the adults take each other on – to put it lightly, he knew how to throw a good punch. He got himself into the rings when he was 16, taking on other kids who’d been thrown into the life that he’d been raised in, and he won almost every single time. There was the odd occasion, some kid with more experience would knock him down and he’d be too tired to get back up, someone else would knock his knee out and leave him incapacitated for months as his leg healed (as he thought about it, he realised that he never did hear from that kid after he told his uncle. He didn’t ponder on it, but part of him knew exactly what had happened).

This time, the crowd was screaming at him to win. He was fighting a guy from Boston who didn’t know the first thing about colour theory based purely on the mix of purple and yellow that he donned on his outfit. It would be an easy win, he was taller than the guy and his uncle gave him a pair of brass knuckles to hide beneath his gloves because the refs didn’t care what happened so long as there was blood on the ground at the end of it. The simplistic nature of the fight didn’t mean that he wouldn’t try to win- God, no. He had a crowd to appease, and they wouldn’t pay him unless he stayed up for ten minutes at the very least.

Michael stared his opponent down from his corner, smiling as his coach and his uncle rubbed his shoulders and muttered the tactics to him. He was called Rimmy Tim, which was a stupid name in Michael’s honest opinion, and he was a newbie to the scene. It was almost cruel to put the two up against each other, but there were worse things that had happened in the ring – Michael had seen them with his own two eyes.

The bell rang and Michael was instantly up on his toes, rocking back and forth with his fists raised to his chest, he was still smiling at the man in purple. The tactic, this time around, was to lure Rimmy Tim into a false sense of security, to make him believe that Michael was going to be his friend after the fight ended – and it almost worked. Michael landed the first punch and was almost deafened by the shouts from the crowd as his opponent spat blood to the mat that they were both on. Rimmy Tim looked around, eyed someone in the crowd, and then lunged at Michael.

Michael hit the floor. Tim stood on the hand without the knuckles and Michael felt something break – he almost screamed, but he’d learned not to show weakness. Weaknesses let people hurt you, and Michael couldn’t afford to be hurt.

Michael kicked his legs out and took Tim down to the floor. He scrambled to get on top of his opponent, but he fell back to the floor as soon as he tried to push himself up with the hand that had been stepped on, and Tim was on top of him before he could process the pain. Tim threw a punch at Michael that made a crack echo through his skull. His nose was broken, he knew that much – he could tell a few ribs had gone along with his hand, from the fact that breathing had suddenly got a lot harder than it had been a few seconds ago. He managed to ignore the radiating pain for long enough to flip them over so he could have a fair go. He used one hand to pin Tim to the ground and used the other to hit the fucker in the face ten times harder than he had been hit himself. His chest was screaming at him to calm down, to take a breath and rationalise it all before he broke his hand as well.

Tactics went out of the window – Michael was fucking _pissed_ , and there wasn’t any room for kindness of any kind now. He used the hand with the knuckles beneath the glove, wound up a punch that would knock a God down to the ninth circle of hell, and landed it directly on Tim’s jaw. The crack of the bone beneath his hand felt good- amazing, almost – and he started to laugh as the pain spread over the latter’s face. He could taste blood dripping into his mouth, coating his teeth to make everything about him red. His entire body was fuelled with this strange energy, he was almost vibrating with the adrenaline that stopped his nose and his hand from putting him out of the job, and he loved every second of it. He hit again, and Tim hit back, and then they were back on their feet. Michael threw another punch that Tim dodged, and vice versa – it went on for another five minutes before Michael got sick of dancing around the ring and hit Tim aside his head to knock him to the floor. Easy.

Michael stared down at Tim as the referee stepped between them – he smiled at the bruise that was spreading across his lower jaw. He laughed as his hand was raised into the air for the umpteenth time, beamed over at his uncle as the medal was dropped over his neck.

His uncle grabbed his shoulders and ruffled his hair as he stepped out of the ring. “If your ma asks about the nose, tell her you ran into a car door. The bitch’ll kill me if she knows you got into another fight.”

Michael leaned into the touch and laughed as he was guided back to the dressing rooms. He winced slightly as his nose bumped into his uncle’s jacket. “She’s not gonna believe that shit, Antonio, you know it.”

Antonio shrugged, and laughed. He pulled a silver hip flask from his jacket and took a swig of whatever was inside of it. “Worth a shot.”

Michael waved at someone who was yelling his name with a smile as he passed by.

Once they were in the dressing room and away from the crowd, he sat down on one of the benches and assessed the damages. His ribs were fucked, his nose was broken, and his hand hurt like a _bitch_. He’d have to get his mom to take him to the hospital rather than school the next day, because there was no way in hell that he was letting his uncle’s contacts go anywhere near his bones in the state that he was in. Sure, he was proud of himself for beating Tim up, but the damages that he’d sustained in the process… Fuck.

He was done, he was 110% done for. His career was gone and the purple fucker in the ring was to blame for it all.

Antonio smiled across at him and threw the hip flask in his direction. It hit his ribs, and Michael couldn’t react to the pain that shot through him without being called a pussy by one of the other managers in the room, so he bit the inside of his cheek hard enough to make it bleed. “I’ll get Marco to wrap it up for ya before you head back, kid. Can’t be goin’ around with an eyesore like that for the rest’a your life. No ladies are gonna like ya if your nose looks like that.”

Michael forced himself to sit up straight and grabbed the hip flask. He tipped what little alcohol was left in it down his throat, and it burned all the way down. “Thanks, Antonio.”

\---

Michael fled Jersey when he was 20. Tim had put him out of fighting for good by breaking his hand, the damages were too much to fix within a decent time frame and his training schedules went out of the window as his body healed from the fight. He drove himself across the country and eventually hit a hub for crime in California – Los Santos, it was called. A man called Geoff picked him up in the same week that he arrived, and he was thrusted into the top crew in the city before he’d even had the chance to scope out the local crime scene.

Five years passed and Geoff was readying them all up to bring a new person into the crew. Gavin, the crew’s hacker who Michael had grown rather fond of, had been buzzing with excitement since it was first brought up, the prospect of a new friend – who he knew practically everything about from his extensive ‘research’ – meddled with the premise of a stronger team seemed to be one of the few things that made the Brit even more unbearable than usual. 

Jack, the crew’s pilot, woke him up after the new recruits had arrived. Reluctantly, he threw on some clothes (a red shirt, Antonio’s leather jacket, and a pair of sweats that he stole from a store when he first got to the city) and followed her through to the meeting room where the two were waiting.

The penthouse looked a lot nicer than usual today. The plants had been watered, the photos had been straightened and the coffee stain that had been in the centre of the landing for two months had finally been cleaned up by someone. The pile of shoes by the front door had been sorted into the shoe rack, with Gavin’s extraordinary number of sneakers taking up the majority of it, and Geoff’s collection of loafers taking up the rest. Even the tennis ball that Michael threw at Gavin on occasion had been placed in the bowl of keys. Michael wanted to laugh at how much they’d cleaned the place up for two people who probably wouldn’t give a shit if the place looked like a crack den that had been burned down and rebuilt with melted Legos. It wasn’t like they were selling the fucking penthouse.

Jack stopped in front of the door and turned to him with a look that made him feel as though his mother was glaring at him from across the country. “You need to be _nice_ to them. And I don’t mean the kind of nice you are with Gavin; I mean the kind of nice where we all get along and don’t jeopardise anything that Geoff’s been planning.”

“I’m not seven, Jack.” Michael shoved his hands into his pockets and fumbled with the lighter that he’d tentatively stuffed in there after it started to rain when he was smoking on the roof. “I’m not gonna throw a chair at the new person. I only did that to Gavin because he was being an asshole, and Geoff applauded it.”

“I know, but…” She glanced at the door and frowned at him. “Just… Be nice.”

He followed Jack into the room and his eyes instantly landed on an outfit that defied all laws of aesthetics. A purple jacket, yellow trousers, orange shirt, and a cowboy hat. His mind went to one place in an instant and- he almost saw a bright and flaming red appear before his very eyes. There was only one person that it could be, because nobody else on the planet would be able to put those colours together without instantly throwing up, and it was the fucker who broke his hand, _and_ his nose, _and_ his ribs, back in Jersey.

Michael stopped in his tracks and glared at Rimmy Tim – the bump in his nose seemed to flare at that moment, as though the bone was as pissed as he was. Everyone in the room stopped their conversation to look at the two. “You’re the _fucker_ who broke my hand.”

“Is that all I did? Shame, I was going for a _lot_ worse.” Rimmy Tim seemed smug, and Michael was pissed, again. Maybe Jack was right when she brought up his ‘anger issues’ a few days ago, maybe not.

Geoff grimaced. Gavin turned to look out of the windows. Both of them knew what was coming, neither could stop it.

Michael lunged for the table and was only stopped by Jack somehow catching him and dragging him out of the room. The door shut and Michael was staring at Jack with a wild look to his eyes, mouth hanging open and hands curled into fists that left his knuckles turning paler and paler by the second. His chest was full of white anger, burning and blazing and screaming to get out in one of the only ways he knew how. It was like a firework that had been stopped seconds before it burst open.

Jack grabbed him and pulled him into a hug, squeezed him tight enough for his ribs to pop a little and for the scent of her perfume to assault his nostrils. He pulled himself away faster than she could pull him back in and stormed away, breathing faster and faster with each passing breath, hands curling and uncurling at his sides. He had to get away before he did something stupider than what he’d just done. Maybe he was being overdramatic, Gavin mentioned that he had a problem with that in passing a few weeks beforehand, but in that moment? He didn’t really care.

He eventually found himself in his room, sitting against his wardrobe with his head in his hands and his knees drawn to his chest like he was a child. His glasses were thrown carelessly onto his bed, the arms still straight up and the lenses flat against the blanket that he’d been happily sleeping beneath before Jack woke him up to ruin his day.

God, he was seething. It could’ve been _anyone_ else on the entire planet – he would’ve been happier if his own mother was stood in that room rather than fucking Rimmy Tim.

Part of him wanted to go back to the room just to see what was happening, but the other part fully believed that he’d already ruined the deal by acting like a fucking toddler and lunging for the bastard. Had it been Gavin, or maybe Fiona, who he’d jumped for - nobody would’ve batted an eyelid because that was how the trio interacted with each other – but this guy was new, they had no dynamic with anyone else in the crew, and Michael had tried to kill them within ten seconds of seeing them. Geoff was going to kill him for ruining the plan, and Gavin… He wouldn’t be shocked to see the affair splattered across their groupchat later in the day, knowing the Brit. Jack wouldn’t visit him until everyone else was in bed to avoid confrontation, and she’d sit next to him and try to be a mediator in one of the few situations that couldn’t be mediated, as per.

Antonio’s jacket was still draped over his shoulders, the old lighter and hip flask that the guy took everywhere with him were still in one of the inside pockets, wasting away – Michael never needed them and even if he did, he knew for a fact that it would be nearly impossible for him to actually take the two items out of their pocket. God, he thought, if Antonio could see him now… He almost laughed, because Antonio would be the one demanding that he went back to the room and hurt Tim in the same way that Tim hurt him, to teach the fucker a lesson that they should’ve learned a long time ago.

But he’d grown since then. He was an adult, now, and revenge wasn’t always the best thing for him, as he learned after being abducted during an attempt at getting revenge against a rival crew when he first moved to the city. Not to mention the fact that Jack would hang, draw, and quarter him at Chumash Pier if he started any more shit now.

“Michael?” Gavin peered into the room with a frown. “Michael, can I come in? I don’t want you to throw a shoe at me.”

“I won’t.” Michael looked up from his hands and smiled loosely at the Brit. “Come in, make yourself at home. Mi casa es tu casa, as the Spanish say.”

“Bilingual, you are.” Gavin closed the door behind him and made his way over to where Michael was sat. He slid down the wardrobe until he was sat on the floor, and he put his head on Michael’s shoulder. “Wanna tell me what happened back there?”

“You already know, Gavin.” Michael held his, previously broken, hand up in the air and frowned. “The orange and purple fucker stood on my hand for a whole minute and broke just about every bone in the fucking thing. I’ve told you a thousand times.”

“Still.” Gavin muttered. “I mean, I would’ve done the exact same if it was me, but Geoff… He’s well and truly pissed, my boy. Off his head, he is.”

“Fuck Geoff.” Michael hit his head against the wardrobe and dropped his hand back down to his knees. “What’s he gonna do, yell at me for the seventh time this week? Oh no, I’m shitting myself in fear.”

“He might fire you.”

“Let him.” Michael shrugged. “Won’t last a week before he’s on his knees at my door to get me back.”

Gavin let out a quiet laugh and then the room was silent again. The sound of people walking back and forth in the corridor was awfully loud, louder than usual, which indicated that someone was either pacing or everybody was going to bed at the ripe time of 2pm. Los Santos was relatively quiet for a Monday, with the only noises worth listening to being the seagulls flying past the penthouse and the occasional sirens zipping past to find the culprit of a crime that had nothing to do with the Fakes, for once.

“I did have a reason for coming in here...” Gavin lifted his head from Michael’s shoulder and let out a long breath. “And you really aren’t going to like what I’m about to tell you, Michael, so you have to promise not to hit me. I am simply the messenger. The Hermes of the Fakes. Gavazon Prime, if you will.”

“Get on with it.” Michael rolled his eyes and turned his head to look at the Brit. He already knew what was coming, Rimmy Tim was a Fake and there was nothing that Michael could do other than suck it up and deal with it like an adult. He didn’t pull the strings unless both Geoff and Jack were both incapacitated, and even then, his powers as the pseudo-leader were limited to telling Gavin not to hack the Pentagon for some late-night fun.

“They’re a Fake.” Gavin’s shoulders dropped and he leaned away from Michael to avoid any misdirected anger that landed on his face. Confusion spread over his face when Michael didn’t react to the news. “Nothing? You’re telling me I got myself all worked up to come in here for you to just… Not react?!”

“I mean, I don’t like it.” Michael frowned. “But I can’t do shit against Geoff unless I pull a solo coup for power. I just gotta ignore the fucker until they apologise, because I’m sure as _shit_ not saying sorry to them first.”

Gavin nodded, slowly. “As long as you aren’t going to go on a rampage…”

“I was gonna head to the quarry, actually.” Michael stood up and rolled his shoulders back. “Blow some shit up, drive a bit, rob a gas station for some cheezits. Maybe get bevved tonight. The usual.”

“I’m in.” Gavin stood up, too, and beamed at his counterpart. “Let me get my normal clothes on and I’ll meet you in the garage. Should I invite Fi or is it just a Nice Dynamite type of day?”

Michael shrugged and put Antonio’s jacket on properly. The hip flask hit against his ribs like it had on the night of the fateful fight. “If you see her, bring her along. The more the merrier.”


End file.
